(This piece was also posted on Huffington Post.)
Los Angeles, CA-- Smoke rises up in the neighborhood. Aromas of steaks on flaming gills perfume the air. The sounds of kids running around, laughing, playing, remind you of Memorial Day. Families get together. Guys drink beer and chat. Women talk about family and fashions. People go to the movies and talk about their goals. Memorial Day is all about these things.
Well, unless you’re remembering. And this might mean that you’ve resisted forgetting. A little something might chafe there, in the back of your mind. It’s so easy to forget. It’s healthy to avoid harmful, bad, ugly things.
What could be worse than war’s flesh ripping, bone smashing carnage?
This Memorial Day weekend I went to visit the wounded, the dying at the Veterans’ Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard. If you’re looking for it; it’s just where Wilshire passes under the 405, a huge complex of buildings, packed with broken, tired veterans from old wars like Korea or Vietnam and new ones, like Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the many large buildings, veterans from different wars are scattered and placed in wards depending on their wounds. Very few remain of World War II, and if you meet any of them, even fewer care to talk about it.
Even though I’ve been around veterans all my life, my naïve expectations were many about this complex of so many buildings. I had an agenda…and even an ulterior motive. I wanted to pass my new novel, Mojave Winds, to as many wounded soldiers from Iraq or Afghanistan as I could find. Today though, most of the staff took the day off to celebrate Memorial Day. So it became a challenge to find the wave of young, wounded soldiers from this new war. I had expected legions of visitors coming here today.
I envisioned hoards of those pious, religious folks here, especially those fundamentalists leaders who preach about how important staying the course is…and the surge…the surge. Maybe large groups of Jews, or Evangelicals, or Catholics, maybe Baptists… For some reason I expected them to come here in bus loads on Memorial Day to sacrifice their time, provide some comfort for these wounded men.
Roaming through the halls, I stumbled through a couple of doors opened to rooms. Young guys were lying in bed. Brian is 27 years old. He’s been here for months. Two years ago, he returned from Iraq with some strange disease that took hold of his body. Maybe it was the water. He’s lost a lot of weight. When I gave him a copy of my book, he formed a smile, though it didn’t last long. I stayed a while and watched the news on TV with him.
No cheerful faces, no energetic young guys, ready take on life, eager to embrace the future. Instead I learned things from them. When going to a VA Hospital, it’s best to readjust your sense of time. Slow down. No one is going anywhere fast. Living in a healthy, civilian life, you might have goals, schedules, and plans. Here, a lot of the guys take it one day at a time.
In a nearby room, Don was sitting on the side of his bed, trying to think about standing up. I sat in a chair. Together we watched the news on the TV for a while. Doubting that he had the strength to read a book, I didn’t dare offer him mine. In addition to the physical wounds, loneliness can weight heavy everywhere, in the air, in these gloomy rooms, out into the halls. As I walked out to the parking lot, I think of how each one of those guys could have been me. I could be one of them.
Then the twisted poetic metaphor came to mind, something about a “smoking gun turning into a mushroom cloud.” Was that all it took to get an entire nation of pious believers riled up for this crusade, a war that makes so many an anointed political leader and CEO extremely wealthy? Those who never carry a gun into battle all too often enjoy the luxury of making war a romantic and lucrative enterprise.
On Memorial Day, we might also remember the greatest of all Infidels to all religions, Walt Whitman, who visited the maimed, the mutilated, and lay down next to the dying.
But aside from these and the marts of wealth and the crowded promenade,
Admitting around me comrades close unseen by the rest and voiceless,
The slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris alive,
I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers.
Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,
That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew,
For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.
If you find the courage to visit the veterans, the wounded, my advice is to go without any expectations. I believed that by giving out my new novel I would help them to take their minds off their pain, their confinement. I learned, though, that just being there, the presence of another human being is sufficient to help the wounded to remember what it’s like to be whole and healthy. This is their Day to Remember that. You become the simple example of hope for their goal…to get out and join the rest of us in every day life.
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